Nominet, the official registry for UK domain names will increase the prices of all domain name extensions ending in .uk on 1st March 2016.

This will result in wholesale prices of both new registrations and renewals of .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, and .uk domains increasing.

As a result of these increased wholesale prices for .UK extensions it will be necessary for us to increase the price we charge for all Nominet domain names, effective March 1st 2016.

How to avoid the increased domain registration fees:

If you want to save some money long-term, and avoid paying the increased domain name registration fees, then now is a good time to either register a new UK domain extension, or renew your existing one. By registering or renewing you UK domain before 1st March 2016 you will avoid paying the price increase.

With this in mind, we advise that you renew your extension for the longest period, so that you can avoid the price increases for as long as possible.

If you have a large number of .UK extensions, then multi-year renewals made before 1st March 2016 could result in significant savings.

More people than ever are wanting to create a website, whether it’s for their business or if it’s just a personal website, such as a blog or a family photo gallery, etc. It used to be the case that people would only buy only one domain name, however that is now changing. Increasingly people are registering more than one domain name.

Boost your popularity

It is quite common for businesses to register multiple domain names in order to not only protect their brand e.g. their brand name plus multiple domain extension – however, increasingly business register additional domains in order to expand their online reach, and thereby reach more customers. Registering more than one domain name is a wise choice. Below are six reasons why you should register another domain:

1. Expand your online presence:

Let customers know exactly what it is you do and what you provide. This has been made easier than ever thanks to the new range of domain name extensions that have been released in the last couple of years. For example, you can now register extensions such as YourName.fitness – which is great for personal coaches or fitness related businesses. Also extensions such as YourName.accountants, YourBusiness.deals, YourBusinessName.restaurant, YourBusinessName.support, etc.

2. Grow your brand:

Many business offer a range different products or services – having additional domain names will enable you to promote these in a more targeted way. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one domain. Many people & businesses own more than one domain name. They do this in order to take advantage of the new extensions to promote other products/services that you offer. Don’t limit yourself.

You may also want to promote specific products or services by create a unique website for it – which would require registering an additional domain name. We recommend that you have a look at some of the new domain name extensions and consider what opportunities they can offer you.

3. Look after your brand:

You should do what you can to prevent sneaky competitors or dodgy people from damaging your brand. For example, they could register domains that use your brand in them – and try to pass themselves off as you or your business. For example, fraudsters could register a domain with your brand in it such as e.g. YourName.discount or YourName.cheap or YourName.sale, etc and try to trick people into thinking the website is part of your business.

You should identify potential online threats to your brand. What domain names should you own to protect your brand? For the sake of spending a few pounds registering domain names associated with your brand – and thereby protect it – you can avoid huge headaches and legal expenses in the long-run.

If somebody register a domain with your brand in it and sets up a damaging or misleading website on it, then while you may end up being able to shut the website down – but the time & money you will have to spend to do this – not to mention the fact that it will distract you from what you should be working on e.g. growing your business – will be very costly, you will be wishing you had just registered the domain back when you had the chance.

Many companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Coca-Cola, etc register hundreds or even thousands of domain names. They realise the importance of having more than one domain name.

4. Capitalise on typo errors:

Another reason to register additional domains is cover any potential loss of visitors to your website as a result of type in errors, which are very common. You can register common type in errors and then set up redirects for miss-spelling of your main domain – get them to redirect to your website.

This will result in you getting more traffic to your site, plus prevent competitors from registering & using them. Many businesses do this e.g. Amazon, who have registered numerous common miss-spellings of their main domain name: amazpn.com and amzon.com, as well as many others.

5. Target specific geographical areas:

Many businesses register additional domain names in order to either target specific sectors for their existing product of service. For example, in addition to having a .COM extension, Amazon targets specific countries using different domain names such as: Amazon.de (Germany), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.jp (Japan), Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom). They can target each country in a way that will result in more business from that market e.g. by having the website written in the local language, etc – all of which will make it more likely people in those areas will want to buy from them.

6. Separate corporate information from customers:

Lastly, you may want to register additional domain names, not necessarily to promote additional products or services, but instead to act as a public place to provide information about your company – such as information for investors, displaying corporate information. This is information that you want to be open about and have available online – but may not be necessary for potential customers to see when they first come to your main website.

For example, some companies have a website dedicated to explaining their sustainability practices, such as the one set up by Nike, who in addition to their Nike.com website, they created a niche site focusing on their sustainability actions, which is: www.nikeresponsibility.com

So, having an additional domain & website could contain information that might not interest you average customer, but for PR purposes may be worth having.

Increase business enquiries

There are many reasons why you should register more than one domain – the ones listed above are just a few. Having more than one domain name (with a website on it) means additional opportunities to be listed in search engines.

The fact is being found in more places, more often will result in more business for you. Registering additional domain names can pay themselves off many times over in the long-run.

Easynic sells hundreds of domains names, including all of the new ones that have been released such as .CLUB, .SUPPORT, .ONLINE, etc. Have a think about how you can benefit by owning more domain names and have a look at what is available with Easynic.

UK.COM and UK.NET domain names have been used by British companies of all sizes and across all industries for almost 20 years. They combine the UK’s national identifier with the popular “.com” and “.net” ending. This helps to improve consumer trust and confidence and can be found by search engines from anywhere in the world. The good news is there are still lots of valuable keywords, place names and short domains with UK.COM and UK.NET still available to register.

Testimonials

“Tea Party loves having a UK.COM address! Shows we are based in the UK, proud and the .com means…yes, we mean business!! Also sounds rather nice… rolls off the tongue with ease”.

– Samantha Check, www.teaparty.uk.com

“Having a UK.COM web address means that we stand out from the crowd, and as we’re about originality, it is the perfect format for our online presence.”

– Live and Unsigned, www.liveandunsigned.uk.com

Resell with Easynic…

Many people are interested in registering a .UK.COM or .UK.NET domain, and the good news for resellers is that they are available via www.easynic.com

All of the most successful websites know about the importance of using images. If you have a website then to maximise its potential you need to be including images – throughout the site, from its main pages and in each blog post. The fact is images will help grab peoples attention when they arrive on one of your webpages – they can engage with the viewer.

So if images are important, then the next logical step it to use the best looking images possible. The better an image is the more it drives engagment. While you may have the budget to pay for high quality images for the main pages on your website, what about getting an attractive image for your blog posts?

If you have the ability to use software such as Photoshop or if you have the budget to get a web designer to create blog images for you, then you don’t have a problem. However, most people are not in this situation – not everyone has design capabilities. But the problem is most people are responsible for getting their own website images – such as blog title images. This can prove difficult for many people – but fortunately there is now a solution: Canva.

Canva is a free graphic-design tool website that makes designing blog title images simple. Melanie Perkins, CEO and Co-founder, Canva said: “When I was at university, I was teaching design programmes such as Photoshop and InDesign. These were really difficult for students to learn and complex to use. It would take a whole semester to just learn the basics. I realised that in the future, design would be entirely different; it would be online, simple, and collaborative.” If you don’t have design capability ot resources such as a web designer to hand, then Canava can solve your woes.

With Canva, users can search from over 1,000,000 images, select what best suits their needs and drag it to resize. Next step is to choose a layout from ready-made options and tweak the background if need be. After that comes adding text. The design is ready to be downloaded and be used – for example as a blog title image. In fact, if you look at the blog image for this post, it was created using Canva!

The video below shows how simple it is to use Canva, so if you want to add attractive images, such as blog title images then visit www.canva.com to get started.

Every week a number of new domain name extensions (gTLDs) are released for the very first time – domain extensions such as .CLUB, .COMPANY, .SUPPORT, .NINJA, etc – times have changed from the days when you could only register traditional domain names such as .COM, .CO.UK, .NET, etc. This year will see the release of hundreds of new domain extensions, all offering huge opportunities – so don’t miss out.

We’ve all been busy getting ready for each new launch and our Sales Dept have been busy answering the phones, taking orders and monitoring our website for the many online orders we’ve been getting.

Easynic always suspected that these new domain name extensions would be popular, since we’ve had a lot of customers expressing an interest to us, months before any of them were officially released.

However, we have been pleasantly surprised by just how popular they are. These new extensions are proving popular not only with Easynic customers, but with people throughout the world. The number of registrations – of the new gtld extensions released so far – from all domain name registrars worldwide is already over 8 million and rising every day – so it’s not just Easynic that have been busy.

Top 10 GTLDs

From the list of bestselling gTLDs above, the stats show .XYZ is the most popular so far – this fun, eye-catching and easy to remember new domain extension is catching peoples attention worldwide. The .XYX extension is promoted “for every website, everywhere” – appealing to an international audience, without any language barrier limitations.

.CLUB is another extension in the top 10 – with over 290,000 registrations so far . The .CLUB is promoted as “the ultimate social domain name, making it easy for anyone and everyone to bring people together around common interests and passions – and own the perfect domain for their community”.

What countries are the buyers in?

The Chinese finally have a chance to register names such as wang, or a domain with chinese characters. With a population of over a billion people, it’s not surprising that there has been a lot of buyers for these names.

The USA comes in second, parlty due to population size and the established tech demand from businesses and individuals in this developed market. Germany also ranks highly – in large part thanks to the demand for the .BERLIN domain extension.

What’s your favourite GTLD?

Have a look at our Reseller – Price List page to see what names are available with Easynic or call us on 0370 757 4400 to discuss how we can help you.

With hundreds of new domain name extensions having been released so far – and with hundreds more coming out in future, now is a good time to check out your options and see what is available for you.

WordPress is a fantastic free, open source blogging tool and content management system. Using WordPress is one of the easiest & cheapest ways for you to create a powerful, professional website on your own.

A popular feature of WordPress is the ability to add “plugins” to your WordPress website – these are bits of software that you can add on to your website that will give it extra functions, and expand the capability of your site. For example, you could add a plugin that allows you to easily include a poll into your website. This means you don’t have to get involved in creating any complicated code, or have to spend money paying a developer to create one for you – the quick & simple solution is to use a plugin which does it all for you.

WordPress was used by more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2015. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, with more than 60 million websites using it. A major factor in the popularity of WordPress is thanks in large part to plugins.

Below are 5 popular WordPress plugins that can help expand the functionality of your WordPress website:

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam..

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further!

Disqus

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

W3 Total Cache

The only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework; designed to improve user experience and page speed. Recommended by Easyspace, this is trusted by countless companies like: AT&T, mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, yoast.com, kiss925.com and tens of thousands of others.

Digg Digg

With Digg Digg by Buffer, you have an all in one social sharing plugin for your blog. Display all social sharing buttons nicely on your blog and make it look amazing, just like Mashable. Display all popular social sharing buttons with count, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Google Analytics is a fantastic bit of software which can provide very detailed stats & information to help you manage your website. It’s completely free to use, but it can at first seem quite difficult to use. However, with a little bit of help you can quickly begin to understanding how it all works – and how you can effectively can use it.

If you don’t already have Google Analytics installed on your website, then visit Google’s Support page to find out how to set up the web tracking code – it’s very easy.

This is a guest post by Brian Tait – a Google Analytics expert and founder of Aillum.com, from where he helps businesses get the most from their online efforts.

Over to you Brian…..

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If you have a website, then you are also hopefully aware of Google Analytics. A bigger hope is that you are using it to good effect to improve the performance of your website, though in reality, you quite probably fall into the more common group of people who have installed the relevant tracking code, but don’t actually use the software on a regular basis.

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to gain insights into how site users behave on your website. Where they come from, what pages they look at, when they look at those pages, which marketing channels work best, which pages cause people to fill out forms, and so on.

Despite the quality of data it can deliver, at no charge for use, many site owners still don’t take advantage of it. In our experience, there are 2 main reasons for this:

Site owners have not known which reports to start with and, as a result, quickly lose motivation to continue using it.

Reason two is the most common, which is understandable given the volume of data and options available within the software. It can be very overwhelming to those new to it.

With that in mind, we thought we’d share 5 useful reports to help you get started, to hopefully encourage you to use Google Analytics more.

Mobile Reports

Where: Audience > Mobile > Overview

The mobile report provides information on whether visitors are viewing your website on a mobile device, tablet device or desktop. As well as details on individual device types (iPhones, Samsung, Nokia etc) these reports also provide information conversion rates per device, bounce rate per device and volume of traffic per device. Ever wondered if you should develop more for mobile or Tablet? Well, now you can find out!

Age / Gender of Visitors

Where: Audience > Demographics

As companies more and more try to refine the audience they are targeting, Google Analytics has recently launched new reports to give more specific information. Using data collected from its own advertising networks, it’s now able to give you sample size data on the age and genders of people looking at your site, as well as common stats (per age and gender) such as bounce rate and conversion rate.

Social Media Reports

Where: Acquisition > Social

Let’s face it. It seems like the whole world is now on Social Media, which puts pressure on companies to make sure they are also there. But how does it actually perform for you? Does it push people to the site? Does it encourage newsletter signups? Which channels perform best (Twitter? Facebook?). The Social Reports will give you a good overview of your social activity is contributing to your website performance, perhaps allowing you to re-prioritise the time allocated to managing it.

Landing Page Reports

Where: Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages

Put simply, there is no point pushing lots of visitors to a web page, if the web page is poor. The landing page report will let you see how each page on your site performs when it is the first page a visitors has looked at. Do they leave straight away? Do they stay on site? Do they go on to contact you? Could you be doing more to improve the experience of that page? The landing page report is one of the single most important reports in Analytics.

Goals Reporting

Where: Conversions > Goals

Goals should be seen as the non-payment version of a transaction. A form submit, a newsletter signup or even a PDF download should all still be classed as a conversion, despite no money changing hands. Google Analytics measures such conversions as “Goals”. Setting up your various site conversion points as Goals will then let you see conversion data in multiple reports across Google Analytics, letting you see which marketing channels convert best, which devices convert best, which regions convert best, and so on.

There are significantly more reports than this in Google Analytics, but hopefully these 5 give you a bit of motivation to start regularly investigating the others.

Aillum provides expert advice on ways to grow traffic and brand awareness from the web, using focused tracking tools (Web Analytics, Heat Mapping etc), and the detailed reports available within various tools such as Google Analytics.

If you have a website then it’s highly recommended that you add photos to it – especially for your blog posts. Photos help engage with your website visitors – they can help draw them in and keep them on your website for longer. It’s well known that blog posts with images in them get more views.

If you are going to add photos to your website then odds are you will need photo editing software – which will allow you to resize, crop, add text, tweek photos, etc, so that are just how you want them.

However, if you want photo software then you will know just how expensive it can be – especially for popular software such as Adobe Photoshop, which can cost over £200 per year.

If you just want to add a few photos to your site, and maybe a weekly blog post, then the costs of most photo editing software may put you off adding photos to your site. But, thankfully there is a free photo editing software, that while not as advanced as Photoshop, it still has the functions that, odds are, will enable you to make 99% of the editing you’ll ever need to do. This free photo editing software is GIMP.

GIMP is fairly straight forward to use, and there are lots of tutorials online to help you learn how to use it, to edit your photos. So if software such as Photoshop is too expensive for you, then we recommend you try GIMP.

If you are interested in creating a successful online business, then it’s recommended that you learn from people who have already achieved it – people who have been there, done that and have got the t-shirt. But where do you find such people, and where can you listen to them share their stories about their trials & tribulations of growing their business? Answer: podcasts!

Below are 5 popular podcasts that are not only entertaining, but genuinely useful for people wanting to set up an online business:

Entrepreneur On Fire – John Lee Dumas

This podcast is for theEntrepreneur, Side-Preneur, Solopreneur, or Small Business Owner. If you are looking for inspiration, motivation, and actionable advice during your daily commute, workout, or “me” time, John Lee Dumas delivers 7-days a week. Each episode brings you a successful Entrepreneur who shares their journey: Their failures, their “ah ha”moments, successes, and much more. Each episode ends with THE LIGHTNING ROUND where John extracts priceless resources and action steps for you.

Smart Passive Income – Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn from The Smart Passive Income Blog reveals all of his online business and blogging strategies, income sources and killer marketing tips and tricks so you can be ahead of the curve with your online business or blog. Discover how you can create multiple passive income streams that work for you so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love, whether it’s travelling the world, or just living comfortably at home. Although Pat confesses he is not a millionaire, he’s been supporting his family 100% with passive income generated online, easily earning a six-figure salary while working only a few hours a week.

Mixergy – Andrew Warner

At Mixergy you can “learn from proven entrepreneurs.” In over 1,000 interviews, Andrew Warner asks uncomfortable questions to dig deep into the success and failures of the most successful business founders and thought leaders. The ideas and stories are so powerful that hearing them will change you. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur crafting your next upstart or startup, there is no greater “street smarts” education than Mixergy. Don’t miss out.

This Week In Startups

Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and a rotating group of guest experts bring you this weekly take on the best, worst, most outrageous and interesting stories in the world of startups. This Week in Startups (also called TWiSt) is a show hosted by Jason that has published more than 500 episodes. Typically, TWiSt produces two episodes a week, one on Tuesday and one on Friday. Tuesday shows generally feature founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists talking about startups, entrepreneurship and the Web industry in general

HBR IdeaCast

A weekly podcast featuring the leading thinkers in business and management from Harvard Business Review. Interviews with business experts including academic researchers, CEOs, authors and business reporters – usually lasting about 15 minutes long.

Easynic provides a host of support services to our customers – all from our UK based support centre. Our expert support specialists can advise you on a range of IT topics. Our staff are available, and ready to help you via phone, email or through our customer ticket system, which you can access via your Control Panel. Furthermore, we have created another support area known as Your Support Services which offers a range of detailed guides to help you get the most from your Easynic packages.

Your Support Services is an online portal providing you with all the information you require to properly use the packages you have with us.

Help with your email

Inside this section we provide full information on setting up your email account on numerous popular email clients and mobile devices including (iPhone and Outlook).
Also, we supply information on our webmail interface and instructions on how to send and receive email over SSL.

Domain Name assistance

This section displays information on the new gTLD validation process, and a FAQ section for everything you want to know about Domain Names

Help with you DNS

The DNS support section provides information on various types of DNS records – from A records to TXT records. In addition to this we supply information on how to Add/Edit/Delete these records.

This section has been extended with the addition of Adding a sub domain DNS entry and everything you need to know about configuring a domain name with your Office 365 account.

Web Hosting support

Our Hosting Help area of your support services offers full tutorials on out inbuilt FTP client, for the more advanced users our Hosting Help guides extend to downloading, installing, connecting and uploading files on external FTP clients on both Windows & Mac such as FileZilla and WSFTP.

We have recently added a new WordPress section which gives tutorials on how to get the most out of WordPress such as changing headers & managing plugins.

Server specialists

Our server Help section gives full video and step-by-step tutorials for server control panels such as Cpanel & Plesk.

These guides go into great detail on various sections of each control panel

Email including setting up pop accounts and configuring auto responders

Domains & DNS including parking a domain and configuring redirects

SSL assistance

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a technology for securing your website, this section of your support services gives full FAQS and an over view on what SSL is

How to effectively manage your services

We are in the process of launching a new control panel. You may have noticed new Dserver, SSL and Email modules within your existing control panel. The “Manage your Services” section gives step by step guides on each area of the control panel.